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TOPSIDE A film by Logan George and Celine Held Starring: Zhaila Farmer, Celine Held, Jared Abrahamson, Fatlip **WINNER - Special Jury Recognition for Directing - SXSW Film Festival 2020** **OFFICIAL SELECTION - SXSW Film Festival 2020** U.S Press Contact International Press Contact Cinetic Marketing Claudiatomassini & Associates Julie Chappell Claudia Tomassini [email protected] +49 173 2055794 [email protected] Short synopsis Underneath the streets of New York City, a five-year-old girl and her mother live among a community that has claimed long-abandoned subway tunnels as home. When the pair is forced to flee above ground into a cold winter night, mother and daughter are plunged into a challenging world of chaos and tragedy that makes their uncertain underground life seem idyllic by comparison. Deftly weaving escalating suspense with sharp bursts of humanity in a nocturnal urban tangle, TOPSIDE marks the feature-filmmaking debut of Logan George and Celine Held (who also stars) and introduces astonishing first-time performer Zhaila Farmer in this affecting tale of the deep love and sacrifice rooted in the parent-child bond. Long synopsis Nikki (Celine Held) and her five-year-old daughter Little (Zhaila Farmer) live a perilous but close-knit and loving existence in the cavernous subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. When city officials raid their encampment, mother and daughter are forced "topside" into a nocturnal world that is even more chaotic, menacing and unpredictable than their subterranean routine. Featuring an astonishing central performance by Farmer, making her feature-film debut, filmmakers Logan George and Celine Held (who also stars as Nikki) cast a child's- eye gaze onto two very different environments — one unspooling in muted darkness, the other in harsh and blinding light — eliciting wonder, fury and suspense out of a mother's desperate and heartbreaking attempts to keep her child safe from harm across one frantic and frigid wintry night. A CONVERSATION WITH FILMMAKERS LOGAN GEORGE AND CELINE HELD How did you two meet? Celine Held: Logan and I met at New York University in 2010, as drama majors. After graduating in 2012, we drifted apart, and during that time, I started writing the script for TOPSIDE. I sent the initial script to Logan in 2014. Logan, what were your first thoughts on the material? Logan George: I was drawn to this idea of a community that was living and flourishing underground; I felt like cinematically it was something that had never been seen before. Because of this concept, we started working together professionally. When did you first start going down into the tunnels beneath Manhattan? CH: The first time I went down was in 2012, but there was no one living down there anymore; I was actually arrested for trespassing. But I saw a lot of remnants of the community that lived down there in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In 2014 and 2015, in order to concentrate on the script, I took Logan to the Freedom Tunnel, which runs down the west side of Manhattan from 125th Street to 72nd Street, it's currently used by Amtrak trains. LG: This tunnel fell into abandonment in the 1980s, when dozens and even hundreds of people made it into a community before they were evicted. Now it's illegal to go there, but we've been down a few times. How did you research the tunnel communities when there was no evidence left of their existence? LG: The city had cleared out virtually everything that indicated people have lived down there, out of safety for the trains that pass through daily. All that remains is the graffiti, and even that's been washed away to a certain extent. This graffiti artist Chris Pape, a.k.a. Freedom, brought the tunnel to its elevated status in the '70s and '80s by spray painting these incredible murals underneath some light shafts, these gigantic pieces of art, which gave the space more of a community feel. He's now in his mid-40s and living in Brooklyn, so we eventually got in touch with him, sent him our script, and he gave it his stamp of approval on the look and feel of the tunnels we created. We eventually hired him to recreate some of his own works from the original Freedom Tunnel in our tunnel we shot in during the production of Topside. Was Jennifer Toth's book The Mole People a major influence on your story? CH: Yes. In 2009/10, I was working for a non-profit on the Lower East Side during my freshman year at NYU, working with disadvantaged kindergartners and also babysitting kids on the Upper West Side. I read The Mole People while I was working, and really sensing the difference between these two sets of kids - the more privileged kids I was babysitting, and the children in the kindergarten. In The Mole People, I came across the line referring to "adults as young as five," which became part of our movie, and I felt like a whole world clicked into place. I wanted to tell a story that was cinematic, like The Mole People, but also something people could connect to, and was very human, like some of the stories I came into contact with working with young children from very different backgrounds. LG: The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City by Margaret Morton was also very influential on our script, as was Teun Voeten's Tunnel People. When did you start making short films about homelessness? CH: We made a short film in Texas called "Caroline," which was shortlisted for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, played at Telluride, and was shortlisted for the Academy Award. But we actually made two documentaries as research for TOPSIDE, one of which is an interactive exhibition called 50 Moments. We interviewed more than 50 people currently experiencing homelessness in New York City, between 2015 and 2018, editing them into minute-long pieces. The other piece, Mornings, came out of us being the first-ever film crew to enter family shelters in the United States. We filmed three different families across New York from the moment they wake up until they leave for work or school. Both of these projects were a huge influence on our script for TOPSIDE, in terms of our major characters and how we came to develop the story. What did you learn from making these films? LG: We always saw it as research, but the research had merit unto itself, which is how the documentary projects were born. We wanted to find authenticity, which led to us recording and filming so many of our interviews. CH: Some of the people from both documentary projects have become very good friends, and went on to appear in TOPSIDE, as cast or crew members. All of our projects have been very collaborative, and we've tried not to be precious about the script or documentaries, being as open as we could to everything our subjects wanted to share with us. TOPSIDE is ultimately a very contained story; we don't want it to stand for anything bigger than what it tells. But in researching for it, we came into contact with some truly incredible stories, and incredible people who helped us shape this world. How did you find the right tunnel for the movie? LG: We could have recreated the Freedom Tunnel and its community on a soundstage, with its unique shack-like living spaces, but it was important to us to film in an actual tunnel so we could make use of the unique acoustics and interiors. We started looking for tunnel systems in the United States, and found some in Ohio and Las Vegas, but they weren't quite as evocative as the original Freedom Tunnel, where in certain places you could look straight ahead for almost a mile. We needed something with that kind of scale. Within New York State, Celine found this tunnel in Rochester that the city didn't know what to do with — it's over a mile long and quite clean with very little natural light, like a big black box. You could be in the middle of it and it's pitch black. It was built during the same decade as the Freedom Tunnel, so it shared similar architecture, and it took us out of New York City, which financially made things more feasible. How did you come to cast Zhaila Farmer in the lead role as five-year-old Little? CH: Jennifer Venditti (UNCUT GEMS) only cast the lead role of our film because she was tied up with other projects. After she read the script, she wanted to meet with us, because she felt a deep connection with the story, and as it turned out, she had already found Little. She was casting for HBO's "Euphoria," doing an open call at a church, and in walked the Farmer family, thinking the church was still operating as a soup kitchen. Jennifer immediately put the entire family on camera with their father’s agreement — they're all gorgeous, and incredibly talented, and they have these golden hearts. LG: We ended up getting really close to them after we cast 7-year-old Zhaila as Little. How did you build trust with the family, and with Zhaila in particular? LG: Going through the process of that definitely brought a lot of trust to Wendell and Diana (his partner and the kids' mother), understanding that we were coming from a good place in terms of the casting and execution of TOPSIDE. CH: After Jennifer cast Zhaila in May 2018, our financing fell through.

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